Thomas Rowley
Chief Technologist - Networking & Connectivity, Softcat
Chris Wortt
Partner Client Lead, ThousandEyes
Ensuring seamless operations and exceptional customer experiences in a retail environment is paramount. As the adoption of SaaS (Software as a Service), Cloud and IoT (Internet of Things) continues to increase network complexity, network observability has emerged as a critical component for retail organisations. Network observability aims to improve operational efficiency, enhance customer satisfaction, and maintain visibility for retail organisations.
This blog explores the top five benefits of network observability in retail, supported by relevant statistics and insights on how Cisco ThousandEyes can address the most common challenges faced by retail organisations. Cisco ThousandEyes is a solution which provides end-to-end visibility from user endpoints to any application over any network.
1. Ensuring seamless customer experiences
With products and prices often being similar across various brands, providing a seamless and enjoyable customer experience can be a key differentiator for retail brands and organisations. Network observability plays a crucial role in achieving this by monitoring the performance of networks and the services using them. This includes tracking the performance of wireless networks, local area networks and wide area networks that glue everything operational together.
Why is this important?
Customer loyalty and revenue growth are critical to the retail sector, and a seamless customer experience is what increases both. According to a study by Sales Forces, 80% of customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. Poor network performance can result in slow transaction processing times, negatively impacting the customer experience.
How Cisco ThousandEyes helps
Cisco ThousandEyes provides end-to-end visibility across the entire digital experience service delivery chain, helping deliver consistent e-commerce and app performance, reliable in-store Wi-Fi, and uninterrupted PoS processing. It also allows retailers to emulate user interactions with their web applications, so they can optimise customers’ experience. This comprehensive visibility helps retailers proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact customers.
2. Ensuring network uptime
Network downtime can have severe consequences for retail organisations. If the network is down, payments cannot be processed, revenue cannot be generated, security systems can fail, and the retailer's reputation can be damaged. Network observability helps retailers monitor the health and performance of their network infrastructure, including WAN connectivity, routers, switches, and wireless access points. It also helps them understand dependencies with third-party suppliers so they can better troubleshoot issues.
Why is this important?
Revenue protection - network downtime can lead to significant revenue losses. A recent report by New Relic found that 37% of retail/consumer organisations experience high business-impact outages at least once a week.
How Cisco ThousandEyes helps
Cisco ThousandEyes offers real-time monitoring across owned and unowned infrastructure, as well as AI-driven insights to detect and resolve network issues quickly. This minimises downtime and helps retailers scale resources quickly to support high-traffic events like Black Friday.
Operational efficiency
Frictionless and dependable IT interactions for staff and customers improve operational efficiency, allowing employees to focus on delivering excellent customer service.
3. Optimising operations and supply chain
Retail organisations rely on a complex web of processes across the internet and Wide Area Networks (WAN) to enable a smooth flow of products from suppliers to warehouses, shop floors, and customers’ doorsteps. Network observability provides visibility across the entire supply chain, helping retailers identify and address issues proactively.
Why is this important?
Business continuity - ensuring operations and supply chain stay connected is crucial for business continuity. Network observability provides enhanced visibility into the supply chain and helps identify connectivity issues proactively, ensuring the smooth flow of products and communications.
How Cisco ThousandEyes helps
Cisco ThousandEyes provides hop-by-hop network path visualisation, offering insights into SD-WAN overlay and connectivity underlay. This helps retailers maintain end-to-end connectivity visibility across the supply chain, ensuring business operations run smoothly. In addition, Cisco ThousandEyes can help improve network performance for contact centres, helping agents and customers connect seamlessly.
4. Enabling data-driven decision making
Retailers often operate in a mix of SaaS, on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Data generated across IT infrastructure can provide valuable insights for business decision-making. Network observability helps correlate and visualise network data, which can be combined with business metrics to enable informed decisions about business and IT changes. For example, retailers can pinpoint an issue that occurred in the network around the time users were unable to complete transactions.
Why is this important?
Informed decisions - correlating network data, such as packet loss at a node, and business impact such as a website being down, helps retailers make informed decisions, identify key interdependencies, and adapt quickly to changing market conditions
Customer understanding - improved visibility into customer interactions and behaviours in relation to network allows retailers to enhance customer experience and assure network performance.
How Cisco ThousandEyes helps
Cisco ThousandEyes' AI-driven intelligence and automated workflows provide real-time insights to retailers that drive data-driven decision-making.
5. Enhancing security and compliance
Retailers handle vast amounts of traffic to their e-commerce channels, sometimes too much traffic in the form of DoS (Denial of Service) events which can bring down services. Network observability provides comprehensive visibility into internet routing so organisations can understand how traffic is flowing and the impact of mitigation efforts.
Why is this important?
Route security - lack of visibility into network activity can result in traffic taking suboptimal routes or hinder recovery efforts during a DoS event, leading to user-impacting issues.
Operational costs - high-priority network issues in retail often require costly emergency interventions and repairs, diverting resources from other strategic initiatives.
How Cisco ThousandEyes Helps
Cisco ThousandEyes offers real-time internet outage detection and comprehensive visibility into network paths and global internet routing feeds. This helps retailers understand where data is traversing to help identify potential route leaks or hijacks and ensure mitigation efforts are successful.
Conclusion
Network observability is a critical component for retail organisations, aiming to enhance customer experiences, ensure network uptime, optimise operations, enable data-driven decision-making, and enhance security.
Cisco ThousandEyes provides the tools and insights needed to achieve comprehensive network observability, helping retailers stay competitive in today's digital landscape. By leveraging network observability, retailers can proactively identify and resolve issues, ensuring seamless operations and enabling exceptional customer experiences.
Ready to transform your retail network monitoring?
Don't miss the opportunity to gain expert guidance and start your network observability journey today with Softcat and Cisco ThousandEyes. Contact your Account Manager or our Sales team, to schedule your specialist discovery session and take the first step towards a more resilient and efficient network infrastructure.